


apocalypse song

by englishsummerrain



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Inspired by The Goldfinch, M/M, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-22
Updated: 2019-10-22
Packaged: 2020-12-28 15:57:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21139301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishsummerrain/pseuds/englishsummerrain
Summary: You understand why people end up here. Everything goes to die in the desert.





	apocalypse song

**Author's Note:**

  * For [4rl](https://archiveofourown.org/users/4rl/gifts).

> hi niz :))) 
> 
> i have lost my mind i cannot stop thinking about this fucking book.
> 
> [here's your mood music, because what else would it be.](https://open.spotify.com/track/5AiNZnMDCWwujIENPj9PV9?si=JJB3n3gpQHOcHkJeZ-5BeA)
> 
> sol (@haesunns) has made GORGEOUS fanart for this [which you can find here.](https://twitter.com/haesunns/status/1212550227267244033)

Out here it feels like the end of the world, or like maybe you’ve been stranded on Mars, no ground control, no mission leader, no accompaniment, no Hollywood directed score and dramatic arc for you to run through. Just dirt and rock and sand, cacti bent sideways by the wind that absolutely rips through the neighbourhood — kicks cardboard boxes and empty soda cans into the air, slams the plastic sheets against the half built frame of the house next door — thwap thwap thwap — like someone banging their open umbrella against the sidewalk to knock the raindrops from the webbing. Except there’s no rain. It’s just desert — hot and empty, filled with poor men who pretend to be rich and rich men who should know better, but they don’t, they can’t, it runs in their veins, makes them shake if they’re not risking it all, not on the verge of a crash landing with every breath. In time, you'll understand this. You'll understand why people end up here. Everything goes to die in the desert. 

America goes to die in the desert.

*

That fucking wind though — out here it's hell, even in winter — worse in winter, maybe. You came here in summer, and you thought it was a kind of hell no-one should ever have to experience — filmy grit whipped up while you lugged your bag from the back of the SUV, empty house with empty rooms, no posters, nothing that says anyone lives here — except drained bottles in the sink and a television that never seemed to shut off in the living room, droning on and on with whatever your dad thinks is good enough entertainment to pass out to. 

In winter: it’s not as hot, but it is just as dry, just as prickly, hurtling down empty expanses of nothing for miles and miles, where you stare out from the end of your street until the horizon just turns into a smudge, like you’d drawn your finger across an oil soaked canvas. 

Once, when you were high as shit, stumbling across the playground with every colour on the world filling up the gaps in your teeth, you thought you _had_ smudged the horizon. Like you’d broken the world open, cracked it and rearranged the parts.

Renjun — he thought that was funny.

“Stop laughing,” you say. He laughs harder — reactionary, of course. He’s like that. Everything is so funny to him — everything you say, everything you do. Failed your maths test — Renjun laughs, corner of his mouth sloping, head thrown back. Dad pissed himself again, drunk — ‘he doesn’t drink, really funny joke, see’ — ‘yeah, I know the feeling’ — laughter. Stop, you tell him. It’s past midnight. He smells like ash and liquor, he always smells like ash and liquor. Stop it. Stop talking. He stops talking and starts laughing, pounds his fists against your chest, tears welling in the corners of his eyes.

Renjun — you could talk about stealing liquor, could talk about the metal composition of the fucking sand out here — 100% awful, in your opinion — he’d think it was funny. Watch you, enraptured. You’ve never known someone that — from what he tells you — should be fucking miserable as shit, ten countries in five years, all bones sticking out of his skin and holes in his shirt — never known someone who would laugh this much. It’s like Renjun has _joy_ inside of him, trapped in the marrow of his bones — and nothing will ever bash it out of him. It radiates from him — skin warm where you touch it. Where he touches you, desert sun and days spent in shadows, hiding from anyone who might see you skipping school and think to —

Who are you kidding, daddy isn't home, and no-one gives a shit about you.

*

In a foreclosed house, you drop acid for the first time, lying on the cold concrete, tab pressed against your tongue like kitten kisses. Renjun’s voice, singing in Korean — fuck, why did you never learn Korean, only your mother yelling down the phone to your fucking father, useless, horrible — sweet lullaby.

“It’s actually quite vulgar,” he says, and you go to ask him but there’s a firework in your peripheral, several, really, flickering, tiny men lighting them up and sending them to the willing heavens. Rat-tat-tat, plastic sheets slamming against the wall. The world seems so fucking — big all of a sudden, and you make a noise, taste it. Renjun laughs and it comes out of his mouth in a colour you didn’t even know existed.

“Do it again,” you say. He does it again. Flowers pour from his mouth, shaded with television static. Somewhere beyond the point of his nose, sloping so perfectly like the kind of incline you want to ski down, the world pin pricks, starts to shrink, and then as you laugh, balloons back out.

“Holy fuck,” you say. 

“Ho-lee fuck,” he repeats, a crayon box overflowing from his prim pink lips. “Dong-lee, fuck me.” Heart skittering like the lizards that circle the columns of the front of your house, and Renjun lets out a wheeze. The world is bright. The world is brilliant, brought to life by the glimmering glint of his smile, snaggletooth, black eyes — laughter, a melody you think is your favourite, wish you could put it in your iPod. 

You were so alone, stranded by your mother's ghost, stranded by this empty house at the end of a thousand empty houses, left to wander the desert by yourself, sit on the playground and watch the apocalyptic sunset set fire to the Earth. You were so alone, and then — bursting through your retinas like an inverted afterimage, scored with impossible colours and blooming edges: Renjun.

No-one will ever stop you, two madmen in the desert, hellbent on remaking this world. 

*

Some nights, when Renjun is drunk and his words start to slur into an indescribable mess of vowels and languages you’ve never even heard of — Korean and Mandarin and Russian and Arabic, and some kind of slang you think he picked up from East London — you understand that warmth is not joy, but fire, temper, snapping and breaking as the bottle of vodka shatters in the bottom of his empty pool. It’s one thing to act like you hate the world, and another to enact it. Renjun enacts it. He kicks a deflated basketball into the shrubs, slams his fists against the ground, wounded animal in a sandstorm — and you’d just snorted a Vicodin and you’re nodding too hard to even respond.

All you can do is watch — sparks flying off Renjun’s beautiful body, burning up like he’s re-entering the atmosphere. Just before you tip off the edge and land face first into the welcoming blackness you think you see it in him, when he rounds on you, finger pointed — break, break, break, every bone in his body broken. Echoing in his eyes, deep dark swirls like the plug hole in the sink, where you think if you stare too long you’ll be lost, be pulled back into this impossible void that every time you wake, every time you stare into the toothpaste flecked mirror, groggy and hungover, you see in yourself. Something that makes you think that one time you might just stare right through, find the spearmint paint of the wall where your eyes should be, because there's nothing behind them, just this unbearable longing to feel like someone, somewhere, actually wants you, like somewhere you have a home. 

Renjun must carry you inside — sun’s too hot, even in winter. Waking up with his arm around your waist — 

“What the fuck,” you say.

“Sleep.”

There’s blood in your mouth. You sleep. You wake up. In the kitchen, eyes sunken and sallow, cheeks full of bread — there’s blood on his face.

*

Here, though — tonight. Sharp wind. Sand in your hair — dark, like his, sunshine magnet. Too hot to touch in summer, and you’d made the mistake of going out without sunscreen and learned how hot that sun really was. Turned red as a lobster. At night — the sand, his hair — it’s in your mouth. 

Renjun is sitting in the living room of his house when you arrive, great empty expanse of a thing, windowsills filled with red-orange-sunset shaded sand, glass panes dirty, vodka and beer bottles stacked on the dining room table alongside the takeout and the attempt you’d had at cooking a pizza three days ago. When you’d thrown it into the oven — stacked high with a can of pineapple and whatever food hadn't gone off in the fridge — you'd just snorted something Renjun had stolen from his dad’s drawers (he won’t tell you what). You’d knocked out on the couch and woken up to the smoke alarm and Renjun cursing in every language he fucking knew, bringing seven generations of misfortune on the charcoal brick in his hands. 

Charcoal brick on the table now — used as a place mat judging by the black streaks all over the varnished wood. Ashtray, too. Snubbed out cigarette butts. The whole place stinks like smoke. Stinks like Renjun, when you pull his shirt close to you and huddle against him in your bed, walls with no posters, schoolbooks strewn across the floor, living out of your suitcase. Just temporary. Just for now.

He’s going. He’s going somewhere else. He told you when your face was pressed against his chest. You’re digging your own grave — it’s what happens out here. Trot music blasting, no-one’s home. He’s fucking leaving, after making you like this. 

There’s no colours tonight. No drugs either — though you wish it was otherwise. Would be nice to be high right now, or dropping off on the couch, crushing up pills with the flat end of a glass and staring at your snow white flecked faces in a pocket mirror — rolling so hard it felt like a technicolour fireworks display in your living room, like you were just fucking _orgasming_ for twenty minutes straight until you couldn’t remember your name, your face, how it felt to have functioning fingers, colour of your mom's eyes — like sadness was just the name of the feeling that filled out your limbs when you inflated yourself every morning.

Well, you know. You can’t be like that. So it has to be this. 

The desert is cruel, empty, filled with the bones of criminals and people who don’t pay back debts. You wonder if you belong out there. You wonder if you're the criminal. You wonder if he’ll chase you down and bury you under the dirt, let them unearth you in a few years, after they’ve taken your face off the milk cartons. Coyotes pick your bones clean, until you’re shiny and white, polished like you’re ready for display in a museum, and no-one will ever be able to say — this rib belongs to Donghyuck Lee, this skull was Donghyuck Lee’s, and he’s dead now because he wanted something far, far too much.

*

So this is your last week. These are you last days. Last moments with a boy pressed against your back when you sleep. Last chances to say what you hadn’t said. Last — last lots of things, really. When you’re a kid, it doesn’t feel like it will ever end, but you know. Businessman’s child. Going around the world. He didn’t even expect to be in Vegas for this long, to be honest, but he was. Long enough that you owe him a debt.

Vodka — pulled from the depths of the glass clattering pantry. Straight from the bottle, between your lips. Sitting in the empty pool, more like sandpit from where the wind blows eastward and knocks the dirt into the bottom. You drink, and you drink, and you talk and you laugh, like you always fucking do, but here’s the thing. You can feel it in your limbs. You can feel the world falling apart. You can feel the goodbyes, but they’re not quite said yet.

Pass out on his bed, because you can’t knock out on the poolside. You should have learned this long ago. His knobby elbows in your back, and you’ve hit your growth spurt and he hasn’t, but he still plays big spoon, he still whispers to you. ‘It’s okay, Donghyuck. It’s okay.’

It’s just a goodbye.

*

[When he leaves, he kisses you. 

When he leaves, you don’t say anything, but there’s words inside of you, burning like the desert sun. 

When he leaves, you think you might eat nothing but sand, for as long as you can remember. It reminds you of him. Reminds you of his sloping smile and the smudged ink birthmark on his hand, reminds you of chasing the sun and landing face first in the desert, reminds you of MDMA fueled nights, dancing in the empty streets, skipping school and spending hours on the couch with him, doing nothing but existing, sand trickling down the window panes like a tipped hourglass.

The number he gives you doesn’t work, and you have his name, but there’s a hundred Renjun Huangs, and none of them are him, there’s seven billion people out there. You might never see him again. You might escape the desert, might sit on the beach in — no, not the beach. Every time you see the sand you taste it in your mouth. You taste him — cigarettes, tremors, this fucking _pill_ addiction you never quite shake. You fucking —

Sometimes you see a flash of dark hair, a laugh, a curse in Mandarin and Russian rolled into one. Narrow shoulders, dancer's waist. Your ATM PIN is the digits of his house number — 1093, and when you withdraw some illicitly earned money his face swims back to you, standing in front of the entranceway of that stupid house, its body all dressed up in sand and sunfaded brick, paint peeling, the only light on the street, numbers burnished gold on the letterbox overflowing with circulars. You lie in bed, shaking, dope sick, and you think you hear his voice.

'It's been eight years Donghyuck, it's been nine years Donghyuck, take your face off the milk carton, get over yourself, stop blowing your retirement money on high class Chinese prostitutes, stop _pretending_.'

You sit on a park bench in some big city with big skyscrapers and hawkers trying to sell you useless shit from China — and everything reminds you of him. You sit on a bench and the pigeons nestle in the tree, cooing at you as if to ask why you haven’t moved on. Wind — cold. You’re in the middle of civilisation. It feels like the end of the world. Everything is collapsing, folding in on itself like pillars of salt in the rain that lashes the building sides, dripping down the awnings like melting ice cream, mud running down the gutters, cigarette butts and yesterday's news, ink black, gold, battered flowers your mother loved. You wish — you wish a lot of things.

Mostly, you just wish you let go of this. This shit from when you were sixteen. This shit you carry in your heart, in your demeanour, in the scar under your eye where he fucking punched you when you told him he was a piece of shit. You wish you understood. You wish you’d known then, had foresight. Hadn’t fucking floundered in the bedroom of your house, his lips on yours, too fucking stunned to ever even know how to move.

You wish he’d come to reclaim that debt, and that you were buried in the desert, his hands on you one last time but — you’re not a fucking genie.

Wishes don’t come true.]

**Author's Note:**

> if you didn't immediately hit back on realising this was in second person i fucking love you.
> 
> you can find me on [twt here!!](https://twitter.com/dongrenle)


End file.
